You can see one of Hubble’s cameras in the National Air and Space Museum.

Like I said, Hubble was designed to be periodically updated. When new tech makes for better cameras, old ones can be taken out and replaced with new ones. When STIS and the infrared camera NICMOS were inserted into Hubble in 1997, the Goddard Spectrograph and the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS) were removed.

While I was still at Goddard Space Flight Center, I used to take a walk around the compound after lunch. I’d sometimes slip through one building that had a massive warehouse, and usually there was something cool to see in there. I saw satellites being constructed, the upper stage of a rocket (without fuel!) on a crane, and all sorts of odd and wonderful sights.

One day, from across the warehouse, I spot what looks like a big black telephone booth sitting on a pallet. Could it be…? I walked over, and yes! It was the FOS! I couldn’t believe it. It was just sitting there, this camera which cost tens of millions of dollars to build. Two sides of it had been removed, and one had been replaced with clear thick plastic. I realized it must be going to a museum; the plastic would allow people to see inside it. But one panel was still removed, so the guts of the camera were exposed. Hmmm…

So of course I reached in and poked around. I had used the FOS for my PhD, analyzing spectra it had taken of an exploding star on two different dates. We wound up not using the data because we didn’t know precisely where the telescope was pointed each time, and so I couldn’t compare one spectrum with another. Still, I spent months learning how the camera worked, and seeing it in front of me was too tempting. It was amazing; I could see exactly how it worked, and all those diagrams I had pored over five years earlier suddenly came alive.

I convinced a friend to come with me the next day to see it, and he took the picture above of me pretending (Yes! Pretending! That’s it!) to snip the wires with a wire cutter. Haha!

Years later, I was visiting DC. I went to the National Air and Space Museum, having completely forgotten the incident at Goddard. I rounded a corner, and there was my old friend. I smiled; I knew it would end up here. The second exterior panel had been replaced with plastic, and you could see into the camera. If you compare the picture above with the one here (click to embiggen) you can see it’s the same beast.

It’s the only piece of Hubble I ever physically touched. Well, besides the insulating blanket that flew on Hubble for years and was taken back to Earth after a servicing mission. Someone had draped the shiny silver blanket over a chair in a room we used to test STIS. When I saw it, I… hmmmm. No. That’s a whole ‘nuther story.

It’s especially important to understand that even th0ugh we’re 22 years into the mission, the telescope remains a unique resource and is still doing frontier research. A few years ago the opportunity was offered to do extremely large multi-year programs of the sort that could not be done early on. There were 39 proposals submitted of which only 4 could be accepted. Clearly. with these programs alone we could have solidly booked the next decade of the telescope, never mind all the regular programs that also remain on the cutting edge.

Sadly, the Hubble will not last forever, and despite 22 years to get ready, we have nothing at all in the pipeline to replace it.

The links to the articles on Meryl Dorey were missing from the Discover Magazine website main page and, when that happens, contact often lags. I’m placing replies to responses here.
In response to Ken, I have placed many items on a number of websites about chemtrails. I didn’t place an item on Rense, I was probably quoted.
Gunnar seems intent on suggesting that I referred to individuals as anti God out of an overweaning regard for what I think. If someone is pro God and another disagrees with them, then that other is definitively anti God. Also, Gunnar doesn’t seem to be able to realize I didn’t say Plait proved a negative! I said that declaring that vaccines don’t cause autism would require proving a negative!
Note, though, how none of those claiming to respect “science” pointed out that claiming vaccines do not cause autism was invalid. How easily they bend rules for their own purposes.
In a more general sense, Plait manages to get an entire airline to stop airing the interview just by expressing his discontent. Intermittently, I would smell the rotten egg smell of a natural gas leak from a manhole near where I live and called the town health department about it. Trying to contact them repeatedly for more than four years, I never received a reply, nor did they even try to do anything about it. It was only after the steam pipe explosion in New York that they acted. Those in positions of money and influence don’t respond to “the public”. But, if you’re acting as a shill for pharmaceutical mega giants looking to make people sicker so they can sell them more recycled pterochamical waste they call “srugs”, you can get airlines to do whatever you want!
And how many defending vaccines even know what evidnece of techniques were used to “verify” that they were safe? And how many are saying the drug companies are right because they’re rich or the companies claim to be “scientific” or those defending vaccines simply despise out of hand those who don’t dismiss out of hand unconventional ideas? To be sure, now that the challenge has been made, the drug companies can make carefully sanitized versions of the “evidence” available so those who promote the drug companies getting obscenely richer can pretend they know what they’re talking about.
And how putridly “ironic” that Plait should say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Where was Ms. Dorey’s freedom respected? Plait and his ilk bloodthirstily eagerly invoke the idea of Constitutional guarantees only being applicable on government property! That’s a common tactic of the New World Order.
And consider Plait’s outrage at American Airlines saying people didn’t need to listen to the interview. The same ilk as the defenders of “science” here pushed for decades for the vicious degradation of culture, promoting everything from nudity to vulgarity in the media, saying if people didn’t like it, they didn’t need to look! How they change the rules they demand for others when it comes to their own wants.
“Science” said that the identical compositions of earth rocks and moon rocks was indisputable “proof” that a planetoid struck earth, hurling the material of the moon off. Now, it’s being said that that’s unreasonable since, if there was another body involved, the compositions should be different, there should be signs of another body! What was once called unquestionable “proof” is now shown to be short-sighted and shallow! It seems only a matter of time before the “uncontestable proof” that leads Plait to announce that they proved a negative will be shown to be illegitimate.

22! My goodness. I feel the way I feel when I see some of my younger cousins, the ones I babysat when they were very small, and wonder how it is they can be all grown up now. How can Hubble be 22? I feel old….

julianpenrod, if you can find this article to comment on, what keeps you from finding the American Airlines article and commenting on this? Your comments are not more likely to be read by the people you’re responding to when placed on a totally unrelated article which just happened to be on top at the time.